MUST TRY HARDER, DAD
After weeks of home-schooling, writer JAMES MOORE has learned he’s not cut out for teaching
AS A CHILD of the 1970s, the realisation at the start of lockdown that I would have to home-school my own children filled me with dread.When I was in primary school there was a movement away from concentrating on the Three Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic – with rote learning shunned in a bid to allow children to express themselves more.
The policy was no doubt wellintentioned but left me and a generation of others with dodgy spelling and a shaky grip on grammar. To me the semi-colon is still something of a mystery.
I think I picked up more of my maths knowledge from Johnny Ball’s TV show Think Of A Number than in the classroom.
So when the coronavirus led to schools closing back in March I knew that my two boys, aged eight and 10, might soon work out that I hadn’t got a clue as a “teacher”. And I was right.
Like millions of other parents across the nation, my wife and I have been wrestling with a curriculum that includes material we were either never taught or have long forgotten.
A Sutton Trust poll found that only two in five parents feel confident teaching their children at home.
Another survey identified that more than half of British parents find home-schooling harder than their day job – which, by the way, many have been holding down while trying to get their heads round mindbending subjects like fronted adverbials.
Those of us who have been struggling are in good company.
Kate Middleton has admitted to having found home-schooling Prince George and Princess Charlotte “challenging” while former school inspector Andrew Jeffrey rated his own attempts to educate his two lads as “atrocious.”
COMEDIAN and father-ofthree Romesh Ranganathan said simply: “The truth is that it’s a nightmare.” But as my children finally prepare to go back to school in the coming days, I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve learnt from the unique experiment imposed on us over the past few months.
We certainly started with high ambitions, drawing up timetables and even a house-points chart.
Within a week any “system” had pretty much broken down, leaving us with a new-found respect for the role of teachers.
I somehow managed to make both children cry with what I had thought was constructive criticism and I could barely keep them focused on their work. Our sessions have often descended into something resembling an unruly episode of Grange Hill.
The mind boggled at how one teacher could handle 30 of these wretches whilst managing to control their own temper. The limits of my knowledge soon became obvious. When I tried to help my eldest subtract decimals from each other we both, to coin a pun, found it difficult to see the point. And the only thing I could conclude from an algebra exercise was that x +y= zzzz.
If x is home schooling, y is work and zzzz is how knackered you are.
Quite often the kids have been the ones teaching us. Recent studies suggesting many adults would fail numeracy and grammar tests.
Goodness knows how parents with teenagers have been coping with having to get their heads around GCSE or A-level material.
I’ve been left with a deep respect for parents of the 48,000 children being home-schooled before the crisis.They must be masochists.
While many children have been getting online lessons and materials from their schools to help them, the support has been patchy.
There are times when I’ve longed for a single quick Zoom session with their teachers so that they can offer some reassurance!
There’s no doubt that those in disadvantaged households have been suffering too. A quarter of parents of school-age children haven’t been doing any teaching at home, according to Booktrust findings.
I’m also sceptical of the Institute for Fiscal Studies survey which found that, on average, students have been studying for five hours a day during lockdown. We’ve averaged about two – on a good day.
Thank God for the backup provided by the BBC Bitesize website and app, with 150 new lessons added every week.
When I feel guilty about how little we’ve done I’ve been consoling myself by thinking of all the famous folk who didn’t need school to succeed.
Winston Churchill struggled with his studies as a youngster, Sir Richard Branson left without any qualifications and entrepreneur Lord Sugar got just one O-level.
TV brainbox Stephen Fry was expelled – twice! Albert Einstein’s school report read: “He will never amount to anything.”
Will our children really be badly affected by this period without school? Probably not. There’s no doubt that they were already further ahead than we were at the same age.
I have been channelling the words of Helena Gillespie, professor of learning and teaching in higher education at the University of East Anglia, who told parents: “Don’t beat yourself up.”
As the weeks have gone by we’ve certainly been obsessing less about what they are supposed to be learning in maths and played to our strengths such as art and history. I’ve revelled in the chance to teach some of the basic things they don’t seem to do at school – such as capital cities, and the dates of kings and queens for instance
The children also seem to have benefited in surprising ways. In the course of a normal week of school and clubs, they have little time to themselves. Yet studies show that boredom can actually bolster creativity and during lockdown more time to play has allowed our two to rediscover many of their toys and enjoy the freedom to come up with their own ideas.
WE HAVE also benefited from remembering that learning stuff just for the sake of it can be fun.
But the value of school beyond the academic learning has also become apparent.
The children have missed their friends badly and we can never replicate at home things such as the benefits of learning to socialise or, dare I say it, a sense of competition with their peers that might spur on their efforts.
Given our lack of sporting ability, I also think JoeWicks should be knighted for stepping in as their virtual PE teacher.
So what do the children think? My younger son has given us 6/10. Which, frankly, I’ll take, though my secret peek at his “lockdown journal” revealed that he had labelled home-schooling “boring”.
The elder one says he has realised that school wasn’t as bad as he thought after all. Which is, er, something.
We’re as keen as they are to see school start again. Though when thousands of families are losing loved ones, the frustrations of home-schooling certainly pale into insignificance.
And through all the arguments, fatigue and head-scratching, I suspect that when we look back we will value this extra time we’ve shared. After all, before the crisis, the average family was apparently spending just 49 minutes together a day.
There’s no doubt that when the school bell starts to ring again I will miss the kids. But oh, let it ring!
‘There are times when I’ve longed for a quick Zoom session with their teachers to reassure me’